Credit: Provided by QUEST
Summary:
Findings by the Kepler telescope, which NASA launched into space in 2009, have led University of California, Berkeley, astronomers to estimate that in our Milky Way galaxy alone there are 40 billion planets similar to Earth, both in size and temperature. Now scientists are trying to figure out which of these exoplanets might have water, the basic ingredient of life.
Full Text:
During six weeks every summer for the past six years, University of California, Berkeley astrophysicist Geoff Marcy and five of his students have spent their nights in a small basement room on campus. The room has a microwave oven, a coffeemaker and a couch with two cushions. But none of them gets much use. Each night, Marcy and his students – usually in teams of two – race to scour the skies from 11 p.m. until 9 a.m. the next morning. Connecting remotely to one of the two Keck telescopes in Hawaii, they search for planets outside our solar system, trillions of miles away. The Keck telescopes are some of the world's largest, and each night of looking at the stars with one of them costs $50,000.
